Nothing says success better than a twenty-something underemployed college graduate sitting alone at the end of a bar drinking a free Sam Adams your waitress friend got you late on a Sunday night. Everything about this situation congratulates you on your accomplishments in life. You have developed an exquisite taste for American craft beer. You don’t have any commitments on Monday morning holding you back from indulging in the finer parts of life. You have taken the time to develop crucial well-connected friendships that allow you to partake in activities at no expense to your almost nonexistent bank account.
Confident with your place in the world you join in on a conversation with the bartender and the bouncer as they close up for the night. You exchange a few jokes and admiration of Tim Tebow. You talk a little about local tax laws and debate whether its worth hiring a CPA or just winging it with TurboTax. You think to yourself that this is the real America. This is exactly what your ancestors strove for when they sacrificed your heritage by changing their last name at Ellis Island. This was the American Dream your great-grandmother envisioned as she shed a slow melancholy tear at the sight of the Statue of Liberty.
Then in an instant your whole identity as an American is shattered to pieces. Out of the blue the conversation turns to My So Called Life and Ren and Stimpy. Your mind starts to race, and you begin grasping at bits of conversation trying to think of a clever input. Claire Danes, that’s a start. You saw Family Stone… God, what an awful movie. Quick. Think of something witty.
But right at that moment, the beer your were just congratulating yourself on acquiring reaches your brain and along with your nervousness spills out in a garbled mess of what could only be interpreted as English on some very primitive level accompanied by a horrific remnant of a Russian accent you haven’t publicly exhibited since hitting puberty. At that moment you realize your ancestors never stepped foot on Ellis Island. Your last name dates as far back as your family, and the only tears your great-grandmother shed were at the death of Great Comrade Lenin.
You might have conquered high school with flying colors. You might have graduated college with a wealth of knowledge in American foreign policy and communication theory, but none of that matters in the end. Because while you waited in bread lines and based your whole existence as an individual on Russian collection of Olympic Gold Medals, your American peers danced the “Macarena” and had all the deep terrifying secrets of life explained by some philosopher named Clarissa who by all accounts was a greater mind than Marx and Engels combined.
And that’s when it hits you. You can drink all the American craft beer in the world. You can pay all your taxes. But you will never be a true American, because you, my dear friend, have FOBBED THE 90s!
I Fobbed the 90s 